NIST Enables Precision Time-stamping of Financial Transactions

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The NIST disciplined oscillator (far right) is a NIST-supplied clock that can be installed at any location worldwide and that is synchronized to the official U. S. time, UTC(NIST), through common-view observations of the GPS satellites. The NISTDO allows NIST to deliver UTC(NIST) to the NASDAQ and other financial markets with an uncertainty of about 10 billionths of a second.

NASDAQ, a leading stock exchange for technology markets, has announced the launch of a precision time-stamping service for tens of billions of dollars of electronic financial transactions each day based on remote provision of NIST official U.S. time.

The U. S. company Perseus Telecom provides NIST time to the NASDAQ and many other financial markets around the world through the NIST disciplined oscillator (NISTDO) service. The NISTDO is a NIST-supplied clock that is synchronized to the NIST standard in Boulder, Colorado to within about 10 billionths of a second.

Perseus Telecom currently has eight NISTDO systems at locations in the United States, Europe, Asia, and South America, with plans to expand in the near future.

At present, the U.S. Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) requires that electronic financial transactions be time-stamped to within one second of official NIST time.

But the NIST-enabled Perseus service permits NASDAQ and other financial markets to confidently and easily use timing to a precision of about one millionth of a second to meet the rapidly evolving needs of ever faster trading. NIST precision timing services such as the NISTDO will enable customers to keep up with changing standards.

NISTDO is just one example of NIST's fast-growing "embedded standards" program to provide high-precision NIST measurements and standards directly to users at any location without having to send artifacts back to NIST for calibration.